Business Blogging

Business Blogging Workshop

A blog is what all “websites wanted to be” updated on a regular basis, contains content that is of interest to a select or target audience and is easy to update and change.

If your business hasn't started blogging yet, then now may be the time to start doing so. There are an estimated 57 million blogs out there and it is doubling every 7 months (source: Technorati). Going back 2 to 3 years blogging was seen as the online rantings of a few would-be journalists. But no more!

These days, you will find executives of car giant GM Blogging, venture capitalists, fruit juice companies, police inspectors, business gurus, would-be prime ministers, SME's, tailors and even sheet metal companies - all blogging.

What do I know about blogging?

I have blogged for around 4 years now and have two, very different, blogs - Mad about Madrid and Marketing Tom- both of which have been created using TypePad - probably the best blogging platform around. My Madrid website generates between 600-700 visitors a day with its main geographic markets being the USA, UK and Spain.

Aside from posting articles to the website, I also extensively use blogging tools designed to build traffic, foster community, generate revenue and analyze visitor patterns. Many of them are what we call social networking or Web 2.0 applications, like Digg It, Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us and even YouTube.

Over the course of the day I will help you create a business blog; share my knowledge on what makes a successful blog; look at ways to develop a blog community and explore some of the tools that will help increase the popularity of your site.

Here is a breakdown of the modules:

Module 1 - A close look at the Blogosphere
The objective of this module is to put Business Blogging into focus. We will look at the development of blogs, the types of companies that blog, business reasons for blogging and the impact that blogs have had on companies. The outcome will be to help you focus more clearly on what your business objectives are for blogging.

Module 2 - Blogging Fundamentals
At this point we will deconstruct a typical TypePad blog and find out what actually makes up a blog's structure: page layout, page titles, article titles, permalinks, comments, trackbacks, archives, categories, typeplists, etc.

Module 3 - Building a Blog
Step-by-step you will start to build your first Typepad blog. You will choose a TypePad name and decide on its layout, colour scheme, font sizes and column widths. You will decide on the sidebar modules you would like to include - pictures, Amazon books, links, RSS feeds, and other widgets. We will add content to the site, create hypertext links, add pictures, create bulleted lists and blockquotes. Finally, we will wrap up by adding Google Analytics code to the site - a powerful statistics package.

Module 4 - Sourcing Content, Writing and Developing Community
I will share with you some useful tips on how to write for your blog and how to keep it up-to-date. We will look at how you can source information relevant to your industry and how you can tailor this for your own site. Another key element of blogging is the development of community and we'll explore ways of tapping into your community using tags, trackbacks and other devices. We will look at RSS, Technorati, and other tools designed to reach a wider audience and keep them up-to-date.

Module 5 - Adding Bling to Your Blog
This final module will look at some of the advanced stuff that you can do with your blog and customizing exactly to your needs. This will mean exploring stylesheets and some advanced components of TypePad. We will look at how to add neat rollover menus to your blog, incorporate Google Calendar and YouTube videos.

Cost
The cost of the course is £195 and includes :

• Course materials
• Full access to our online knowledge centre with useful documents and links